The Tudor revolution
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Cromwell wanted the king. Only Charles’ stubbornness signed his death warrant.
We don’t have to call the landlords bourgeoisie. Call them capitalists. They all had fingers in the colonial pie too. Just that the king had most of the benefits, which many couldn’t handle. But they weren’t feudal barons – which is where this argument began.
The enclosers – the men who made their land into pastures for sheep – were capitalists. They employed labor, produced for an international market, and reaped the profits.
The enclosure movement in England is one example of agricultural capitalism. ‘
English feudalism apologises:
“Sorry I didn’t hang about until the bourgeoisie could overthrow me, but my demise called before then. Again, sorry if this fouls up the Marxist blueprint somewhat.
Sincerely yours,
English feudalism.”
Who said that Habsburg Spain was a “feudal conglomeration”. It wasn’t me. I just said that it wasn’t a “nation-state”. Or do you think that pre-1917 Russia was a “feudal conglomeration”?
And how can there be a “nation”-state without the concept of a “nation” as a group with a common interest and destiny (even if this is only an ideology of a ruling class to gain consent its rule)?
Ok, the leaders of the Dutch and English Revolutions and their followers didn’t call themselves as “citizens”. That would be an anachronism (that’s why I put it in inverted commas). But they did, I think, regard themselves as something equivalent under a different name (against the Norman Yoke, etc).
Anyway, to talk of a “bourgeoisie” in England in the 17th century (or any century actually, as that’s never what the capitalist class in England and their predecessors called themselves) is also an anachronism as that too is taken from later French experience.
. “It went on to state that the Cavaliers were mostly formed of aristocracy and gentry, while the Roundheads were drawn from the lesser gentry and the middle classes.
The reality was that, to challenge the authority of the king, parliament had to have a substantial number of great nobles on its side. In the words of John Adamson, it was a “noble revolt”. The older nobility, who had served in government and at court, tended to fight against the king (their long-establishment gave them a greater confidence in challenging the crown). The classic royalist noble tended to hail from a family that had not been involved in government or court, or a nouveau riche who had got their title since 1600.
“When you look at the king’s field officers throughout the war, you find that three-quarters of them didn’t have a coat of arms. In other words, they weren’t even drawn from the class that traditionally ran local government, let alone central government.”
There certainly was the concept of a nation in Elizabeth’s time.
And none of this bears on the fact that the king’s supporters were not feudals but capitalists, if not in the modern sense.
Dear Feudalism
I am afraid that you have misunderstood what we said about you. It was this:
“The modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (…)
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.”
We are of course grateful to you for allowing capitalism and the capitalist class to develop within you, not that you could do anything about it.
Yours for the Socialist Revolution
Dr. K. Marx. F. Engels. 1848.
“The best patrons in the nobility of Charles I’s court painter Sir Anthony van Dyck, the archetypal recorder of the Cavalier image, all took the Parliamentary side in the Civil War.”
And just to emphasize the above quote from ALB here are two more from Christopher Hill:
The issue was one of political power. The bourgeoisie had rejected Charles I’s Government, not because he was a bad man, but because he represented an obsolete social system. His Government tried to perpetuate a feudal social order when the conditions existed for free capitalist development, when the increase of national wealth could only come by means of free capitalist development.
The financial expedients of Charles’s personal Government affected all classes. Feudal dues were revived and extended, and that hit landlords and their tenants.
“The decline in the feudal system continued for the next 200 years, and by the time of Henry VIII it “had for all intents and purposes ceased to play any great part in the rural economy”. However, as late as 1574 Queen Elizabeth “found some stray villeins on royal demesne to emancipate.” (56)
Spartacus Education.
This was a long processs culminating in industrial capitalism.
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. [13] If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [15] The Genesis of Industrial Capitalism.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htmTherefore, Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea were matured for a proletarian revolution instead of carrying over a bourgeoise/nationalist revolution. The SPGB should erase all the articles written about this process and teach something different to the sympathizers and new members. Bernstein is not the only Marx revisionist
In 1850 Marx himself wrote an article on “England’s 17th century Revolution” in which the following passage occurs;
“For M. Guizot, the great mystery is the conservative nature of the English Revolution, which he can ascribe only to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas in fact it can be found in the enduring alliance between the bourgeoisie and a great part of the landowners, an alliance that constitutes the major difference between it and the French Revolution, which destroyed the great landholdings with its parcelization policy. The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie — which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII — did not find itself in opposition — as did the French feudal landowners in 1789 — but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact, their lands were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, there were able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it.”
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